Death Bliss
I leave it in her pocket, and I leave it under my conscience, and I understand, as I sit alone in the archive room with the smell of her soap still in the air, that in this house a gift and a test have always been the same word.
I understand something else, too. The version of myself that swore the oath at Lorenzo's grave is still standing behind my shoulder, and he is watching me, and he is waiting to see what I will become. But tonight, for the first time since I came back from Buenos Aires, I am not sure which of us is the ghost.
Outside the high north window, the olive groves are black. The road is still gone. Somewhere in the dark, Serafina Bellini is unfolding a map of all the doors in